Interview – Bart Ehrman on Jesus Mythicism
My very special guest today is Professor Bart Ehrman. Bart will need no introduction for most people, but in case you aren’t aware: he is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of over 30 books on early Christianity and New Testament studies, including the best sellers Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible. Those and other books have made him the bête noire of Christian fundamentalists. But his book Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth also made him deeply unpopular – predictably – with Jesus Mythicists, since he holds that fringe theory in very low regard.
So today, thanks to generous donations from people I’ll thank by name at the end of this interview, I have the great pleasure of discussing Jesus Mythicism with Dr Ehrman. We cover a lot of ground in just one hour and I’m sure some of what he says is going to set the cat among certain pigeons. So please enjoy my conversation with Professor Bart Ehrman.
32 thoughts on “Interview – Bart Ehrman on Jesus Mythicism”
But his book Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth also made him deeply unpopular – predictably – with Jesus Mythicists, since he holds that fringe theory in very low regard.
This has the slightly nutty aroma of the “Trump (or, Warren, inter alia) Doesn’t Want You To Read This” chestnut.
Mythicists (among which I do not count myself) do indeed note that the book treats that theory with disrespect. The problem isn’t with the rebuttal, but with the disrespect. They argue the book does not make its own case well. Ehrman himself admits he didn’t want to write the book.
It is possible to write a rebuttal to a fringe(?) view without losing one’s cool. Cofnas was able to rebut Kevin MacDonald’s antisemitism. Victor Davis Hansen was able to rebut @martyrmade’s WW2 revisionism. “Black Athena Revisited” put paid to Bernal. You yourself have swatted away poor arguments about the Inquisition vis-a-vis Galileo (although you have a blind spot on Islam / Henri Pirenne).
Maybe Ehrman should simply yield the floor on mythicism to someone else.
It’s not worthyof respect. But fringe theorists and crackpots always think they deserve respect that isn’t owed to them. It’s a stupid thesis.
Trust me – I know how fringe theorists work. He could have written a multi-volume, comprehensive opus that chases every single one of their arguments down its rabbit hole and they would still not be satisfied. They are only interested in acquiescence. The book was not intended to satisfy Mythicists because it wasn’t written for them. It was written to explain to the general reader why historians and scholars accept it’s most likely a historical Jesus existed. it does that well. You seem as confused as the Mythicists as to what the book is about.
I have never mentioned the rather outdated Piernne Thesis, so I have no idea what you’re talking about. You seem to have some odd ideas.
” yield the floor on mythicism to someone else.” -like who? The thing about fringe theories is that most academics don’t want to go near them as the whole practice of responding to kooks is largely a waste of time and beneath a professional scholar. It’s not often that you find an esteemed biologist debating evolution deniers, or an astronomer jumping into flat earth discourse. Ehrman is a rare gem insofar as he engages with the public more than others in his profession, but even he rarely talks about mythicism, and I doubt he’ll ever give it another book treatment.
I’ve always found Ehrman to be one of the less convincing people on the mythicism question, and this interview furthers that. The beginning in particular was frankly embarrassing as he struggled to answer your very basic arguments.
If he’s not interested in this debate that’s fine, but why is he inserting himself into the conversation if he’s not going to bother even understanding the basic arguments?
He did? No, he did not.
Of course Jesus existed. Muhammed and Buddha also existed. Religions don’t grow from a vacuum.
To be fair it isn’t impossible for the founding of a religious tradition to be attributed to a mythical figure. Jesus having existed, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean Abraham did too.
FWIW, Wikipedia indicates there is some doubt about Abraham, and even more about Moses — at least in the sense of being able to unearth a plausible historical figure from beneath the layers of tradition, unlike what has been done for Jesus.
Yeah, the founding of Rome was linked to the story of Romulus and Remus, who were said to be the sons of a god and thus part of wider Roman religious traditions, yet there’s no compelling reason to think those twins ever existed. Japan’s emperors are traditionally associated with overseeing the Shinto religion with the narrative that they descend from a deity, but the earliest emperors are generally considered wholly mythological.
There’s no shortage of religions whose origin stories involve individuals who in all probability really did exist (Jesus among them), but there are exceptions as I noted, Abraham in all likelihood being as mythical as Romulus.
Yes, respected geologists do write books proving the Earth is more than 6,000 years old: See ‘The Age of the Earth’ by G. Brent Dalrymple
And, yes, I would like to see an expert historicist engage the details of the mythicist (Carrier, Doherty) argument – with substance and evidence.
I recall in the 1980s there was a great debate about whether scientists should tackle Creationism or whether doing so gives it respectability. It was only when it began to take hold with large numbers of people that we began to see substantial arguments against it in the public sphere by scientists. This was mainly from 1990s onward (note when Dalrymple’s book was published). But these are books for the general reader, not peer reviewed work for other scholars. So the equivalent here is Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? or Maurice Casey’s Jesus – Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? So, these kinds of books exist.
I imagine if Mythicism ever got anywhere near as accepted by the broader public, more scholars would produce detailed refutations. But while it remains a tiny fringe idea that most people don’t even know about, let alone accept, I doubt you’re going to get what you’d like to see. Sorry, but scholars have better things to do with their time than play Whack-aMole with every silly idea that comes along.
>I doubt you’re going to get what you’d like to see.
Same, im still sitting here waiting for this magical turn of consensus where biblical scholars shake off the chains of “Big Christianity” and finally come out and accept Mythicism. (though i am exaggerating with the Big C. part, i’ve seen blog posts by Carrier where he says that the field is somehow captured by Christians.)
Im actually in awe whenever i see a blogpost of his and he actually thought that was smart to type out
“where he says that the field is somehow captured by Christians.”
They all do that…
*Climatologists are Marxists and/or communists (and thus global warming’s a hoax)
*Economists are just trying to prop up capitalism..
*Mainstream biology has been hijacked by materialism (and thus biologists are lying/incorrect about evolution)
This is a page right out of the slimy populist playbook.
Another thing they do is exaggerate instances of scholars getting things wrong, and use them to try and discredit the whole discipline. Didn’t Carrier once make a gigantic fuss about Ehrman getting a relatively minor detail incorrect (and he then corrected himself, and showed why it doesn’t affect the bigger argument either way)?
When I encounter mythers online , I just send them to your page
Wise.😉
Great interview – and I look forward to your next project with excitement.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
IT HAPPEND!
I still don’t see how anything you’ve said justifies how EVIL Christians who hated science burned down the Library of Alexandria!
As far as I know, it still couldn’t be determined what and when ended the library of Alexandria. From 43 bc during the fight of Caesar in the Alexandrinian war up to the 7th cent destroyal by the islamic invaders several theories have been proposed. The Serapeion was destroyed by Christians, but there exist no dependable historical informations about the fate of the library.
He was joking. Accusing Christians of destroying the Great Library is classic athiest bad history trope. I have a whole article about it here: The Great Myths 5: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria.
Hello again, Tim.
I’m so glad to see this partnership (for lack of a better word) between you and Dr. Ehrman.
Would you give some details on what brought it (finally) about?
Bart was aware of my Mythicism articles here and I thought he would be a perfect (likely) final guest on my channel, so I got his private email address from a mutual acquaintance and approached him.
There seems to be a basic error in the mythicist argument, viz. that unique input is ‘made up’. Five people can write the story of someone they knew (or didn’t know). In some cases of course they refer to… and check.. what others have said. In other cases, they add or modify but originality isn’t synonymous with invention or fiction.
I’m surprised that Ehrman doesn’t realise how much material is published which is issued by apparently serious presses, but never evaluated by specialists at all. The publisher’s name … such as Springer.. misleads readers into supposing anything it publishes has been vetted.
So it does mean something – not everything – whether something is, or isn’t a peer-reviewed item.
I have a constant problem with arguments offered that rely on references to non-reviewed articles mistaken for serious ones. Books from Brill, OUP and some other academic presses are peer-reviewed by definition, but not even all academic publications are.
I’m pretty sure he is aware of this. In fact, he’s explained the difference between “trade” books and academic books many times. He’s noting how weird it is that people like Carrier emphasise that one of his books was peer reviewed, as though this makes it special. In the context of scholarly discourse, this is simply normal. So, in that context, his emphasis is very strange. It’s clearly intended to impress the clueless.
Tim,
I hope you’ll post here directions to any new projects. I don’t use FacePalm or Twitter-as-was.
Free Inquiry (one of CFI’s flagship magazines) just published a(nother) set of articles on the debate: https://secularhumanism.org/volume/no-2-vol-46/. The two Mythicist articles are silly — the long one even cites David Fitzgerald FFS. Ron Lindsay’s reply rips the author a new one.
Personally, I don’t think any of those articles are particularly good. The long Mythicist one just takes Carrier’s arguments and claims as gospel. The responses are too brief and don’t actually engage with the arguments very well.
Almost five months since your last post. Everything OK?
AS I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m winding down the History for Atheists project. I’m working on a long article on Galileo for the Great Myths series and once that’s done I’ll only be posting new material, mainly book reviews, very occasionally. The whole New Atheism thing has waned and I’ve covered most of the main topics here over the last ten years. I have other things to spend my time on.
Tim,
Could you post info here about where you are posting any historical posts or essays now? I don’t use Facebook or Twitter-as-was.
Twitter/X is about it at the moment, sorry.